In the early days of our mooted move to Stratford, I was a fervent opponent. Why not rebuild the Chicken Run? Do we really want a running track in a stadium that is not purely our own? What about the aura of the Boleyn? Another stadium banished to the history books like The Dell, the Baseball Ground, Roker Park and Highbury.
That pessimism has had to give way to reality, as well as democracy, after a supporter poll found strong backing for our move from E13 to E20 (the ground, not the nightclub in EastEnders). I had to understand that despite my misgivings about the business of football, money matters and the added revenue and the surge in executive packages would help solidify West Ham’s place among the country’s elite.
However, my pessimism – like any West Ham fan’s worries – has not completely died and I was reminded of this while listening to a podcast from a few years back. It cited a 2003 report by Thomas Dohmen, from Bonn’s Institute for the Study of Labor, that looked at 3,519 matches over 12 Bundesliga seasons. The title of the study was, “In Support of the Supporters? Do Social Forces Shape Decisions of the Impartial?”
Of course, as with any such report, the title doesn’t do the paper justice. What Dohmen found was that in football (well, German football at least) referees were influenced by the crowd and often ended up favouring home teams. This took the form of lengthening games when the home was behind by one goal, especially when the crowd was dominated by a large section of home fans. Referees were even found to favour the home side in terms of penalty kick and goal decisions.
Yet here’s the big takeaway: the report found that the strength of a referee’s favouritism depended on the crowd’s closeness to the pitch and was even influenced by the presence of a running track separating the home fans from the pitch. Such was the case in Berlin and Munich’s Olympic stadiums.
“A remarkable finding is also that more penalties are awarded in stadiums without a running track,” Dohmen said. “Strikingly, given that a penalty was awarded, the decision was more likely to be correct when the game took place in a stadium in which a track separates the stands from the field.”
His conclusion: “A likely explanation for the observed behaviour is that referees are emotionally influenced by the atmosphere in the stadium.”
Now, there are many problems with the study: in the year the report was published, Bayern Munich won the Bundesliga while playing in a stadium with a running track. Furthermore, the report only surveyed German football and, perhaps more importantly, you can’t say a referee is the most important determinant in the outcome of a football match.
You may also add that our stadium has retractable seating – yet I still remain to be convinced by this plan and there are already concerns about a sizeable gap between the fixed upper tier and retractable lower tier.
My history may be blinkered, but I certainly feel that West Ham’s home advantage was far more evident during the days when the West Stand had not become the behemoth it is now, and with the pitch shifting away from the boisterous Chicken Run. In the fifth-placed finish of 1999, we won 11 of our 19 home games, losing only 5.
In fact, a quick bit of dodgy maths: I looked at the average number of home games we lost in the 12 seasons since 2002 (just after the West Stand was built) and compared that to the 12 seasons before. On average, before the new stand was built, we lost 4.91 home games per season; since then, it’s been 6.58.
Now, in the years since the West Stand was built we’ve spent a couple of seasons in the Championship, so we had to play more games. Yet arguably, maybe we went down because the atmosphere was just not as intimidating?
Then again, it could just have been about the lack of decent football, something Dohmen’s report did not look into either. So maybe the conclusion is much simpler: just play good football in the new ground.